Company

Jaunt - /jônt/ - noun - a short journey, especially one taken for pleasure

Background

The idea for Jaunt originated in early 2013 when one of our founders returned from an amazing experience at Zion National Park. What if he could go back there for a brief jaunt, at any time, from any place? The emerging consumer VR industry provides the mechanism to travel to virtual worlds. We aim to put realism back into the virtual reality experience, lending an uncanny sense of presence never before possible with any other technology.

Our Team

We are building an outstanding team of scientists, engineers, and broadcast professionals. Current members hail from Stanford University, Caltech, Java, Apple, Intel, Lucasfilm, Disney, Hearst, NBC Universal, AOL, Zynga, Condé Nast, News Corp, and Hulu.

Jaunt has a global presence, with Jaunt HQ in San Mateo, Jaunt Studios in Los Angeles, business offices in London and New York, and Jaunt China based in Shanghai.

Executive Team

As a recognized leader in traditional and digital media, George Kliavkoff is responsible for scaling Jaunt globally. Kliavkoff joined Jaunt from Hearst Corporation where he served as co-president of Entertainment & Syndication, Hearst’s largest operating division responsible for Hearst's interests in cable television networks, including ESPN, Lifetime, A&E and History; television production and distribution; and merchandise licensing. Kliavkoff also served as president of Hearst Ventures, which makes strategic investments in companies operating at the intersection of media and technology.

Prior to Hearst, Kliavkoff was chief digital officer at NBC Universal, where he was among the team responsible for the creation and launch of Hulu.com. He was Hulu's first leader and served on the JV's board. Kliavkoff vastly expanded NBCU's digital media strategy, developing new business models and markets and overseeing the distribution of video and other products and services across digital platforms.

Prior to NBCU, he was an executive vice president for Major League Baseball Advanced Media where he oversaw MLB's online and mobile subscription and licensing businesses as well as all business development.

He earned his BA from Boston University and his JD from the University of Virginia.

Arthur van Hoff is a serial entrepreneur and was most recently CTO at Flipboard. He started his career in Silicon Valley at Sun Microsystems where he was an early developer of the Java programming language. Since then he has started several successful companies including Marimba (IPO 1999), Strangeberry (acquired by TiVo), ZING (acquired by Dell), and Ellerdale (acquired by Flipboard).

Arthur has expertise in machine learning, big data, mobile applications, 3D printing, and computational photography. He is originally from the Netherlands and has a master’s degree in Computer Science from Strathclyde University in Glasgow.

Fabrice Cantou is responsible for leading global finance operation at Jaunt. He has nearly two decades of financial, operational and corporate development experience at both fast-growth technology start-ups and large corporate organizations.

Prior to Jaunt, Fabrice joined Dailymotion in 2007 and served as CFO from 2010 to 2016. During his tenure there, he successfully managed fundraising and led the company through transitioning from a pre-revenue start-up to a $100+ million global organization reaching 300M viewers and delivering 3B views per month. He also guided two financial exits for the company, Orange in 2011 and Vivendi in 2015.

Fabrice has previously held senior finance and consulting roles at Orange and Accenture and has gained multinational experience. He holds an MBA from Kedge Business School (France) and HES (Netherlands), as well as a Master’s Degree from the Media Business School (Spain).

Jean-Paul (J.P.) Colaco serves as Jaunt’s Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) and is responsible for global revenue generation across the company

Prior to Jaunt, he was Senior Vice President of Advertising and Business Development at Vessel, a next-generation online video service. J.P. was instrumental in the signing of more than 200 content partners for the launch of the service and sold all advertising exclusively with Fortune 500 brands. Vessel was acquired by Verizon in October 2016.

J.P. also served as Senior Vice President of Advertising at Hulu where he grew the company’s advertising business from zero to over $500 million in annual ad revenue, overseeing a team of 150 employees. Under his leadership, the Hulu advertising team was recognized as the best new sales team by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and as media supplier of the year by Mediapost Magazine.

He previously worked at The Walt Disney Company for over a decade, holding several roles including Senior Vice President of Business Development and President of Radio Disney.

J.P. earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and an Honors B.A. in business (Ivey Business School) from The University of Western Ontario in Canada.

Matthew Zinn is General Counsel and Corporate Secretary for Jaunt and serves as the company’s chief legal officer and oversees worldwide legal affairs, provides council and direction to the company’s executive management team, business units, and legal staff. Mr. Zinn’s deep business experience in multi-channel video distribution, content, media, telecommunications, and intellectual property gives him the ability to anticipate legal and regulatory challenges.

Prior to joining Jaunt , Mr. Zinn was Senior Vice President, General Counsel, Corporate Secretary, and Chief Privacy Officer for TiVo Inc. The San Francisco Business Times and San Jose Business Journal recognized Mr. Zinn as the Judge’s Choice for the Best Bay Area Corporate Counsel in 2014 and he was awarded Dealmaker of the Year by the Association of Media and Entertainment Counsel in both 2012 and 2013 for negotiating a series of litigation settlements as part of a patent enforcement program that resulted in a total of more than $1.6 billion in guaranteed payments for TiVo.

Previously, Mr. Zinn held senior legal positions at MediaOne Group Inc. and Continental Cablevision. Before moving in-house, Mr. Zinn worked for the law firm of Cole, Raywid & Braverman (later merged into Davis Wright Tremaine) in Washington, D.C. representing communications clients before federal, state, and local government agencies.

Mr. Zinn holds a J.D. from George Washington University’s National Law Center and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Vermont.

Dominic Collins is responsible for Jaunt’s international business and operations, managing activity across the EMEA and APAC regions from the International HQ in London. Dominic is focused on partnering with creative content and production companies, as well as brands and agencies, to create immersive cinematic VR experiences for global distribution. He also sits on the board of directors for Jaunt China, a Joint Venture with China Media Capital and Shanghai Media Group.

Olaf heads up cloud operations at Jaunt. Prior to joining the Jaunt team, he was at ShoreTel, a leading supplier of enterprise and cloud VoIP platforms. There he architected the VoIP application platform as an early engineer, lead the product management function as the company went global, opened the European business operations, and later lead Engineering of the VoIP platform and applications for mobile, desktop, and web.

He began his career with Network Computing Devices (NCD) as an early stage engineer, making X Windows display stations. He built software for distributed graphics workstations, designed ASICs for graphics acceleration, and developed the core logic for their consumer web browser.

Before joining Jaunt, Lora led AOL’s east coast video sales team and was responsible for original programming, branded content, innovative ad formats and programmatic video. During her tenure there she also managed various strategic verticals for all products within the AOL portfolio.

Lora began her digital career in Sales at eGroups.com, which was acquired by Yahoo!, where she worked across different business units in Sales and Marketing. Lora later joined BBE (Broadband Enterprises) where she was VP of Sales, responsible for development of video solutions and custom content creation for its East and Midwest territories.

Lora played an integral role in the acquisition of BBE by Specific Media. Post acquisition, she remained with Specific Media (now Viant, a division of Time Inc), helping to define the company’s video strategy.

Lora achieved an Undergraduate and a Master’s degree in Energy and Environmental Analysis from Boston University. In her spare time, she enjoys yoga, running, snowboarding, deep-sea fishing and live music. She currently lives on Long Island with her husband and two children.

Prior to Jaunt he held CTO, VP of Technology, Software Architect, Director of Engineering, Advisor, and Consultant roles at various companies including Walt Disney Studios, Booz Allen and Hamilton, DivX, Massive Media Group, NeuLion, Rovi, and San Diego State University. Eric championed change, innovation, and disruptive technology at all of these companies, and helped launch a number of successful services and products.

Eric has many inventions in content distribution and content protection, including 16 granted patents. He has collaborated with Hollywood movie studios and consumer electronics companies to move forward the vision of easy and secure access to digital content. Enabled by significant jumps in video compression technology, he architected one of the first secure Internet video delivery systems.

He earned his degree in computer science and physics from San Diego State University.

Miles Perkins brings a wealth of experience to Jaunt in the fields of media communications, entertainment and emerging technologies. Before coming to Jaunt Miles was a 23 year veteran of Lucasfilm where as Head of Corporate Communications he was responsible for the development and implementation of communications and public relations across all Lucasfilm companies globally, including Industrial Light & Magic, Skywalker Sound and LucasArts. Prior to this role Perkins served as Director of Marketing and Communications for Industrial Light & Magic. During his tenure he was central in developing and managing the ILM brand and possesses a deep knowledge of the creative and post-production process. At ILM he worked on a wide range of projects including the Star Wars prequels, the Jurassic Park series, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, Iron Man 1 & 2 and is credited on nine feature films including Super 8, Rango, Star Trek, Transformers 1 & 2, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Iron Man.

Mitzi is responsible for developing and implementing Jaunt’s global corporate strategy. She brings expertise in consumer digital media businesses and over $3B in deal experience. Prior to Jaunt, Mitzi was Founder and CEO of GoodLooks, an online marketplace of lifestyle experts.

Before GoodLooks, Mitzi served as Executive-in-Residence for The Chernin Group, where she led the strategy for subscription digital video services, and advised on the formation of Otter Media and acquisitions of Crunchyroll and Creative Bug. This was a natural segue from her previous position as SVP of Strategy & Business Development at Miramax, where she was the business lead in the $500 million library securitization and executed digital licensing partnerships with Netflix, Hulu, and AOL.

Earlier in Mitzi’s career, she worked at NBC Universal where she was a core leader in the creation and launch of Hulu.

Mitzi currently serves on the Board of Directors for Harmonic (NASDAQ: HLIT) and Entertainment One (LON: ETO).

She earned an MBA in Finance and Strategic Management from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and a BA in Economics from Claremont McKenna College.

David is responsible for business and revenue development and dealmaking at Jaunt. Prior to joining Jaunt, David was the COO and General Counsel of Lucasfilm Ltd., where he was responsible for the day-to-day business of Lucasfilm and all of its subsidiaries, including Industrial Light & Magic, Skywalker Sound, and Lucasfilm Animation Singapore.

In 2012, he negotiated the $4 billion acquisition of Lucasfilm by The Walt Disney Company, earning him the Variety Dealmaker of the Year Award. He also negotiated production, distribution, merchandising and licensing deals for Star Wars and Indiana Jones, technology transactions, online ventures, mergers and acquisitions, and real estate development deals for Lucasfilm. David began his career as an intellectual property litigator in Silicon Valley.